Due to increasing traffic congestion, travel modeling has gained importance in the development of transportion mode detection (TMD) strategies over the past decade. Nowadays, recent smartphones, equipped with integrated inertial measurement units (IMUs) and embedded algorithms, can play a crucial role in such development. In particular, obtaining much more information on the transportation modes used by users through smartphones is very challenging due to the variety of the data (accelerometers, magnetometers, gyroscopes, proximity sensors, etc.), the standardization issue of datasets and the pertinence of learning methods for that purpose. Reviewing the latest progress on TMD systems is important to inform readers about recent datasets used in detection, best practices for classification issues and the remaining challenges that still impact the detection performances. Existing TMD review papers until now offer overviews of applications and algorithms without tackling the specific issues faced with real-world data collection and classification. Compared to these works, the proposed review provides some novelties such as an in-depth analysis of the current state-of-the-art techniques in TMD systems, relying on recent references and focusing particularly on the major existing problems, and an evaluation of existing methodologies for detecting travel modes using smartphone IMUs (including dataset structures, sensor data types, feature extraction, etc.). This review paper can help researchers to focus their efforts on the main problems and challenges identified.